A 17-agency panel documents 14 key findings ranging from selective FACE Act prosecutions to IRS viewpoint discrimination in 565 page report released today
A federal task force established under President Donald Trump released a sweeping report Wednesday alleging that the Biden administration engaged in a pattern of discrimination against Christians across nearly every major cabinet department, from the Justice Department to the Department of Education to the Department of Homeland Security.
The report, issued by the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias pursuant to Executive Order 14202, was signed April 30. Led by the Department of Justice and drawing on findings from 17 federal agencies, it catalogs 14 specific findings of alleged religious discrimination and outlines remediation steps the current administration says it has already taken.
The report’s central thesis is that the Biden administration tolerated privately held Christian beliefs while systematically penalizing Christians who sought to act on them — particularly on matters involving abortion, gender identity, and sexual orientation.
FACE Act Enforcement
Among the most detailed allegations is the claim that Biden DOJ prosecutors applied the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act against pro-life demonstrators with a heavy hand while responding far more leniently to attacks on pregnancy resource centers. The task force says prosecutors sought average sentences of 26.8 months for pro-life defendants, compared with 12.3 months for pro-abortion defendants charged under comparable circumstances.
The report goes further, alleging that abortion-rights advocacy groups including the National Abortion Federation and Planned Parenthood functioned as quasi-enforcement partners, preparing dossiers on pro-life advocates — including photographs and personal information about the advocates’ children — and alerting the Civil Rights Division to their activities. In one case, the task force says prosecutors attempted to exclude jurors based on their Christian beliefs and privately described a federal magistrate judge as a problem because he was “very Catholic” and attentive to defendants’ First Amendment rights.
IRS and University Targeting
The report alleges the IRS denied a Christian organization’s application for tax-exempt status on the ground that its “Bible teachings are typically affiliated with the Republican Party and candidates.” The task force says the IRS appeared to investigate Christian groups whose values aligned with conservative politics while overlooking open candidate endorsements at other houses of worship.
On higher education, the Department of Education under Secretary Miguel Cardona fined Grand Canyon University, a Christian institution in Phoenix, $37.7 million over tuition cost reporting. The task force notes that the fine dwarfed penalties levied against Pennsylvania State University ($2.4 million) following Jerry Sandusky’s serial child molestation and Michigan State University ($4.5 million) following Larry Nassar’s assault of hundreds of athletes — institutions where the government found no religious identity worth targeting.
Catholics, Cemeteries, and Candles
Some of the report’s examples land at the intersection of the mundane and the constitutionally serious. The National Park Service denied a Catholic organization permission to hold a quiet Memorial Day Mass inside a Virginia national cemetery in 2023 and 2024 — a ceremony the group had conducted for generations. The task force includes a letter from attorneys for the Knights of Columbus arguing that the denial constituted viewpoint discrimination under the Free Speech Clause, citing the Supreme Court’s line of cases running from Rosenberger v. Rector to Kennedy v. Bremerton School District.
In Oklahoma, a Catholic hospital was reportedly told to extinguish a religious candle or risk losing its Medicare, Medicaid, and Children’s Health Insurance Program funding. A Christian student in the Department of Labor’s Jobs Corps program was repeatedly barred from holding a voluntary Bible study outside of school hours.
A Counter-Narrative in Waiting
The report is certain to generate sharp disagreement. Critics will observe that the task force’s mandate was defined by its conclusion — the executive order that created it directed it to find anti-Christian bias, not to weigh whether one existed — and that several of the cited enforcement actions involved facially neutral laws applied to conduct, not belief. The FACE Act prosecutions, for instance, turned on physical obstruction at clinic entrances, not theology.
The report itself makes an implicit concession to First Amendment universalism, closing with the assertion that “the First Amendment’s promises are for all, not just Christians.” Whether that framing represents genuine pluralism or political cover for a document that is, at its core, a partisan audit of the previous administration’s record, will depend entirely on where the reader sits in the American religious and political landscape.
What is not in dispute is that the report now exists as official government record — 17 agencies, a presidential imprimatur, and a set of remediation actions already underway. The litigation it may generate, and the congressional scrutiny it may invite, are only beginning.
ReligiousLiberty.TV covers First Amendment law and church-state litigation.
